From the Washington Post - 24 January 1994
INFORMATION HIGHWAY CROSSES THE SEA The Information Highway arrives at ... 14 Caribbean islands. Cable & Wireless (West Indies), AT&T and France Telecom announced a deal last week to build a fiber-optic network across the seabed. Scheduled to be commissioned in early 1995, it will run 1,100 miles from the British Virgin Islands in the north to Trinidad in the south. The cost will be about $60 million. It will be the largest system in the world that employs no "repeaters," units that sit on the ocean bottom and amplify the signal every so often. If ones goes bad, you've got to raise the whole cable and fix it. The cable will have capacity for at least 30,000 simultaneous phone calls, or the equivalent in data, video, you name it. Many islands in the region are trying to upgrade their telecom systems to attract service jobs. Notice that the clerk answering that toll-free vacation reservations number has a Jamaican accent? It might be because your call has rung straight through to Jamaica. One other reason to go with undersea fiber in this region: Hurricanes tend to take out earth stations every few years. --- WinQwk 2.0b#1165